Raspberry Pi Roundup - a Pi-controlled coral reef, an update to Raspbian and a compact Atari

Coral Reef

Ranjib Dey loves his salt water aquarium which is home to a miniature, living, coral reef. It takes a lot of expertise and monitoring to keep this fragile ecosystem alive and to do it he has decided to bring in a little bit of Raspberry Pi know-how. The system, calledreef-pi, which comprises the Pi, some relays and an analogue-to-digital converter to grab sensor readings, is growing all the time and currently has the following features:

AC 110/220v equipment control (on demand and periodically based on timers)

DC pump velocity and LED based light intensity control (using PCA9685 PWM driver)

Atari

PJ Evans posted up a picture of his latest project on Twitter: an Atari 2600 console made out of a Raspberry Pi Zero embedded in an Atari game cartridge. He has since blog-posted an account of the building of the console. This is a great write-up of a great project, well in the capabilities of an intermediate maker. He used a craft knife and a rotary tool on the cartridge case and then embedded the Pi Zero inside. A couple of serial port connectors were added to allow the addition of the Atari joysticks and, of course, several buttons and toggle switches to mimic the original console. PJ has used RetroPie as the main operating system and then loaded Stella to emulate the Atari. He has then added Adafruit’s Retrogame library to the mix to handle the translation of GPIO triggers into keyboard commands. To read the full write-up, and see lots more photos, head over to PJ’s blog.